About
Why Lintra exists, and who is behind it.
I’m Matthew Wells. I build and run open-source IT infrastructure for small behavioral health and psychiatric practices, out of Little Rock, Arkansas.
Why this exists#
Small practices get a bad deal on IT, and it’s structural rather than anybody being villainous about it.
A four-clinician practice has close to the same compliance obligations as a hospital system and none of the staff to meet them. The realistic options are an MSP that resells the Microsoft stack at a markup — where you end up renting your own operations, with per-seat costs that climb and a migration path out that gets more expensive every year — or doing nothing, which is what a lot of small practices actually choose, and then quietly hoping.
The tooling to do this properly is free and has been for years. Nextcloud, Keycloak, Wazuh, and the rest are serious software that large organisations run in production. What small practices lack isn’t software, it’s someone to assemble it correctly and stay responsible for it. That’s the whole idea behind Lintra.
The open-source part isn’t ideology#
It’s a practical position about who holds leverage.
When your files, identity, and audit logs live in someone else’s proprietary platform, your exit cost grows every year you stay. Prices go up because they can. Features get moved into a higher tier because they can. You find out your data is only exportable in a format nobody else reads.
Open source doesn’t fix that by being free. It fixes it because the software running your practice is software you could hand to a different administrator — or run yourself — without asking anyone’s permission. Everything I deploy is software you could take custody of tomorrow. I’d rather be worth keeping than be difficult to leave.
I also think the second option is more common than most people admit, and it’s a bad way to run a business.
What I write here#
Configuration that actually works, and the reasoning behind it. Specific enough to follow, including the parts that are annoying and the parts where being wrong has consequences.
If you read a post and go build it yourself, that’s a good outcome — that’s why it’s written down. If you read it and decide you’d rather have someone else be responsible for getting it right, that’s what I do.